Compression of stored e-mail

We’ve recently upgraded the Dovecot mail server software we use, and a new feature allows us to do something we’ve wanted to do for a long time: compress stored mail on our servers. We’ll be starting to do that over the next few weeks.

Compressing mail happens invisibly on our end. It makes no difference to what you see in your mail program, and you don’t need to do anything or worry about it.

The benefit to our customers is that it saves 20-30% of the disk space the messages use. While most of our customers don’t store very large amounts of mail on our servers, those who do will see their disk space usage drop by 20-30%.

Read the rest of this entry »

New Year’s (2014/2015) Holiday Hours

Our business offices will be closed on Thursday, January 1 to observe the US legal holiday. As always, our support staff will be providing same-day support for time-sensitive issues via our ticket and e-mail systems. However, questions that aren’t time-sensitive (including most billing matters) may not be answered until Friday, and telephone support (via callbacks) will be available only for urgent problems.

Christmas 2014 Holiday Hours

Our business offices will be closed on Thursday, December 25 to observe the US legal holiday. As always, our support staff will be providing same-day support for time-sensitive issues via our ticket and e-mail systems. However, questions that aren’t time-sensitive (including most billing matters) may not be answered until Friday, and telephone support (via callbacks) will be available only for urgent problems.

WordPress 4.1

WordPress 4.1 was recently released, and as always, we’ve updated our WordPress one-click installer to automatically install the latest version for new WordPress sites.

If you’ve previously installed an older version of WordPress, you should update it from within your WordPress Dashboard.

By the way, the new WordPress 4.1 Twenty Fifteen theme doesn’t display a default navigation menu, unlike earlier themes. To ensure you’ll always see a list of the pages on your site, our installer now adds a Pages widget at the top of the sidebar for new installations. If you later create a custom navigation menu, you’ll see two lists of pages in the sidebar. You can just delete the extra Pages widget if that happens to you.

Out-of-date WordPress sites will get hacked

I’m going to use annoyingly big type, on an annoying yellow background, because it’s important:

If you use WordPress, you MUST update your plugins and themes whenever you see that an update is available. If you don’t, your site will eventually be “hacked” because of a security bug in old software. The contents of your site will be replaced with something malicious, and your e-mail will be used to send offensive spam.

We have a page with more information, including:

  • why this is a problem
  • why it would happen to your site in particular
  • the two most common ways sites get hacked
  • the risks of not fixing it
  • the risks of inactive plugins and themes
  • the steps to update WordPress properly

Some Mailman list mail delayed (resolved)

Due to a problem with the Mailman list management software, some Mailman list mail sent yesterday (December 2) and this morning (December 3) was delayed (although most was delivered normally).

We’ve resolved this. All delayed list mail has been delivered, although some messages may have arrived out of order due to the delay.

Read the rest of this entry »